Today In Conservative Closure

Where movement conservatives enable their political leaders to do more
or less as they please, progressives seem far more willing to challenge
and question “their side.” The siege and persecution mentalities that
movement conservatives have long cultivated as coping mechanisms for
their long history of domestic policy defeats and losses in the culture
wars tend to make them far less willing to break with “their side,”
which is why there is such importance placed on conformity and “team”
loyalty. That means that movement conservatives typically have had to
stifle, mute or otherwise water down any objections they do have to
Republican policies under Bush. Then, once Bush is gone, for the sake
of “the team” they feel they have to exaggerate their objections to
Democratic policies and politicians to the point of absurdity to create
sharper contrasts with the dismal record of Republican governance they
just spent the last decade making possible.

Those on the right who value facts and intellectual integrity are often
quick to dismiss the epistemic closure problem as being a phenomenon
that plays out on both sides of the political spectrum. And that's
true, to some extent. But it plays out very differently. The reality is
that the liberal intellectual community does an infinitely better job
of policing the problem. There a far more people on the left who are
willing to call out reality denial when they see it, even among their
own ranks. This just doesn't happen nearly as often on the right, and
those who engage in it -- see, e.g., Manzi or David Frum -- get
ostracized.

Writers at the American Scene or
the Frum Forum might disagree with each other, but they're not going to
call each other wingnuts, as Manzi did to Levin. You can admire Manzi's
courage in speaking truth to power while acknowledging that NR's
denizens weren't totally out of bounds in taking offense at his manner.

Of course, this points to an inherent problem with maintaining a
blog that functions as a bulletin board for the conservative movement.
The standards of entry are extremely low, and the number of
contributors is vast. The practical effect of this is to force a huge
number of conservatives to grant each other collegial deference. This
makes it harder for a conservative like Manzi -- who, for all his flaws,
does craft arguments with data gleaned from outside the hermetic
universe of conservative talking points -- to actually call a spade a
spade.